Washington, January 27
Barack Obama cruised to a crucial victory over former first lady Hillary Clinton in a bitterly contested Democratic primary in South Carolina, giving a boost to his campaign to become America’s first black president.
Obama’s return to the front after two consecutive losses, in New Hampshire and Nevada, brought him back into reckoning ahead of the coast-to-coast February 5 “Super Tuesday” battle when both Democratic and Republican parties hold nomination contests in 22 of 50 US states.
John Edwards, the party’s 2004 vice-presidential nominee who was born in South Carolina, finished third with 18 per cent vote.
There are those who doubted this country’s desire for something new,” Obama said to a cheering crowd in Columbia chanting “Yes, we can” and “We are change”.
About half the voters were black, according to media interviews with voters as they left polling places, and four out of five of them chose Obama. Black women voted in large numbers. By contrast, Obama got a quarter of the white vote while Clinton and Edwards split the rest.
At stake in South Carolina were 54 delegates to be distributed among the three in proportion to their vote. To win the party’s nomination one needs 2026 of 4050 elected in primaries and caucuses all over the US.
Obama now has “momentum” said Merle Black, a political scientist at Emory University in Atlanta. “It leads a lot of Democrats to look at him again as a presidential nominee.” Clinton called Obama to congratulate him and headed from South Carolina to Tennessee, a February 5 state, as the results began to roll in.
“We now turn our attention to the millions of Americans who will make their voices heard in Florida and the 22 states as well as American Samoa who will vote on February 5,” Clinton said in a statement.
— IANS
